Less than 6 months after launching, online music streaming upstart Spotify has reached an important milestone: 1m users. Approximately 250,000 of those users are located in the UK.
And Spotify is making progress on the business side too: it has signed up some big ad agencies who are trying out its new ad targeting platform.
The one millionth user registration came at 19:50 GMT on March 1 according to a post on Spotify's blog which reads:
Our user growth has been amazing since we launched back in October, in particular the past few weeks have been phenomenal and growth continues to pick up speed. We can only thank our users who have been great at spreading the word for us and we look forward to our next big milestone.
By the looks of it, future milestones will probably be commercial in nature too.
NMA recently reported that MEC, Starcom, Universal Mccann and Zed Media have signed on to use Spotify's ad targeting platform. Spotify plays a maximum of one 45 second ad every 20 minutes and will also be rolling out demographic targeting options in the future.
So is Spotify an iTunes killer as some have suggested?
Spotify is still only available in 6 countries - the UK, Sweden, Spain, France, Norway and Finland - so it's not competing yet on the global stage. But the service's growing popularity is evident and perhaps the best indicator of this is the fact that an ecosystem of websites is being built around Spotify.
ShareMyPlaylists.com, for example, is a new UK-based website that enables Spotify users to share their playlists and discover new music by perusing the playlists of others.
Founded by Spotify user Kieron Donoghue, ShareMyPlaylists.com makes playlists searchable by the keywords used in song descriptions and also allows users to upload custom artwork for their playlists. According to Donoghue, "ShareMyPlaylists.com is a new service mainly aimed at the UK audience and those that prefer a UK slant to their musical choices. We believe that this service will really encourage our visitors, both here and abroad, to share and discover great new music."
ShareMyPlaylists.com joins other Spotify playlist sharing services such as Spotwify and spotiSHARE. There's also a Firefox Spotify search add-on.
The fact that such services are springing up is a good sign for Spotify. As we have seen with services like Facebook and Twitter, third-party developers can be a real boon to a website's popularity and success.
As Spotify (hopefully) expands its reach internationally, expect more of these services to be created, helping propel Spotify's appeal and growth even further.
Patricio Robles is a tech reporter at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter.
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9:53PM on 2nd March 2009
I love Spotify - i use it a lot, especially when i am working. However, i'm spending less on iTunes (probably £10-15 per month) - but i would spend more if i could press a 'buy this song / album) button and/or get it onto my iphone...
i think i would def pay monthly if Spotify took away the free option and/or iTunes offered it (but then again, i really like the spotify interface and it's way quicker than iTunes)
Overall - i think we are moving towards a better, sustainable model for music online. I really hope it doesn't go bust - everyone i show it to is amazed.
1:03PM on 3rd March 2009
Go Spotify!
3:23PM on 3rd March 2009
Another approach to music discovery is 'social music recommendation' based on the psychological perception of music. Our new service Music Patterns (http://www.signalpatterns.com/music_survey) provides customized playlists based on music that 'People Like You' actually listen to.
Using a psychology-based approach to music preferences</a>, this method combines your individual preferences with identifying those that are similar to your 'music personality.'
This new form of social music recommendation was developed from years of research in this area by best selling author Dr. Dan Levitin and our team at Signal Patterns.
6:51AM on 7th March 2009
Cool, I think this is interesting, I'm going to try this also. thanks for sharing!
9:23PM on 12th May 2009
94% of all music is purchased illegaly, this is the way to combat that fight, there is no point trying to train people to pay for music, it simply doesnt work.
For labels this is a great thing. Sites like www.dittomusic.com put your content onto Spotify for FREE,
With the amount of traffice you get on Spotify and with the new 7digital link, a lot of people are listening on Spotify, discovering new music and purchasing elsewhere.